This laptop does have a dedicated GPU and was quite decent for the time. It was my only gaming machine for quite some years. Now I want to keep it alive with Linux for other general uses or work. Said dedicated GPU has been the source of many issues even when it still was under issues. The setup of Intel i5 with integrated graphics + an AMD Radeon GPU is uh... shaky under most driver circumstances and applications never know which of the two to use (usually defaulting to the wrong one)
I've been running Wayland to "get used to" the newer technology, and I don't think that in itself has much impact on performance... Even if I do turn off the effects on KDE, I still feel like it's doing way way more than I need or want it to do, and it does have a very noticeable impact on the speed things happen. Slightly slower than Cinnamon was, although both are also still way faster than it's last Windows install... lol
Right now the main "problem" I have is that KDE is handling a few things I want it to handle, and that there's a lot of applications I installed alongside it that I'd have to remove to swap fully to another DE. Almost makes me think it'd be easier to do another clean Arch install, but that took me almost a week to fully set up. (as I'd start to find the things that I hadn't yet configured or installed gradually)
I've been hearing good things about it, makes me wanna try it.